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Comment by dboris

Nearly every Helf in Off-hand items for casters have approximately the same stats (~25 spelldmg) wether it's from Karazhan or BC blue instances. This one however has much more interesting stats and spelldmg.

This is the only one so far which will be a fairly good replacement for the Heroic reward offhands.

Comment by Silky

The Orb is great and all, but 17 hit, 23 crit, and 12 intellect alley-rapes 9 shadow-only spell damage and 2 stamina all day long. Bank on it.

Comment by wenziz

Oh, and let me add that if it comes down to it, I might even go with spell damage and crit ONLY on hand stuff and go stats only for amror :P

Comment by aquanda

All this talk about crit and damage is disturbing me. Until you get 16% hit talented you are not the best Mage/Warlock you can be. You should prioritize Spell Hit, then Spell Damage, then Crit. A balance of the 3 is ideal, obviously you don't want 16% hit (max) and 15% crit. Thankfully spell damage and hit always go together on armor so you don't really have to trade off one for the other very much. The best suggestion I could give is to replace all your +9 Spell Damage gems with spell hit and damage gems to get your Hit% as close to 16% as you can (14% and above is a good number to shoot for), then go from there.

The bottom line is the closer you get to 16% the fewer partial resists you will be seeing and the more damage you will do overall. I hate nothing more than seeing a 7k Shadow Bolt crit with 1200 of it resisted, huge amounts wasted damage.

Comment by sevla

I feel obliged to point out that on a frost mage, your crits are your biggest damage with 2.5x damage per crit.A bit off topic, but frost spells criticals do 2x damage, not 2.5x

Comment by Riceak

As a shadowpriest I can only say that I would totally take this as an upgrade from Heroic Badge reward. First of all.. it has spell hit rating, spell crit and almost as much spelldmg as my current.Spell hit-> shorter cd on Mind Blast, Spell Crit-> More crits with MB+ Shadow Word: Death, which gives my group of mages alot more mana back. In fights like Al'ar, Lady V, Solarian etc where Im in a group of 2xshadowpriest and 3x arcane mages I can go all out dps with MB+SW:D and not go oom, and if I had more crit+shorter cd on Mind Blast then that would mean my dps would be even higher.

Btw... only getting pure spelldmg as a shadowpriest works for a while.. but when u get to 1200-1250 +dmg you gotta get into BT/MH to improve your +dmg, so to increase my dps I go for more spellcrit aswell as hit. But ofcourse Im not letting my spelldmg decrease all that much.

Comment by Aestil

Increasing your crit rating by 23, while lowering your +dmg by 9 is a bad trade off, unless you need the +hit. These items are 'close' for a shadow priest, but the Heroic Badge reward is still better. The crit is equivalent to having 4 more +dmg. And that is if you are spamming MB and SW:D everytime the cooldowns are up. Obviously, only a few fights in the game allow you to use death that much. Therefore, even being optimistic about the value of crit rating for a shadow priest, tells you that from a pure dmg standpoint, this is inferior to the heroic badge oh.

Comment by chazkohler

Is it just me, or does blizzard make books really cool looking....

Comment by joeyh31

Which is better for mages, this book or the Off-hand that drops off Shade of Akama?

Comment by XxiolaA

4.2 will bring back this badass paired with Tempest of Chaos and Tier 5 set - awesome.